Bearpaw

Snowlines finally shifted lower, and the addition of almost a foot of soft snow made riding much more pleasant than the previous day, when a crust was near the surface. We didn't detect any slablike qualities or wind transport in the new snow. A few small dry loose avalanches, or sluffs, had recently run from very steep, rocky areas, which was the extent of avalanche activity we saw. 

The highlight of the day was getting almost a foot of light, dry, snow at mid and upper elevations in the previous 24 hours. Even at lower elevations, there was about 6" at 2500ft. All the new snow was soft, low density, and not affected by the wind. 

Beneath the new snow layer was the 3/12 crust from the Wednesday evening warmup. The layer was detectable everywhere, but upon stepping off our sleds, it felt much less "crusty" at 6000ft, our max elevation. 

In the two pits we dug, the main notable difference was the snow between the 3/12 and 3/8 crusts. In one pit, we suspect there had been large amounts of transport loading the slope, whereas in the other pit, the layer appeared more representative. In both pits, we got moderate and hard failures progressively further down in compression tests in the new snow layer, at 15 and then 20cm deep. 20cm is where the obvious failure on a shovel tilt test was. No layers propagated in an extended column test. 

We saw small, dry, loose avalanches when we first arrived in the area, which had recently released from very steep, rocky terrain. Beneath one of those new sluffs, we saw evidence of an old crown and a larger debris pile further down the slope than the sluffs were running- evidence of the prior high avalanche danger. We didn't see any other avalanche activity during our day.